One Way Heroics (PC) Review

The game is a no-holds-barred rogue-like. You name the character, select a class, set some minor stats, and you are thrown into a world with essentially no story and no tutorial. It is sink or swim pretty fast, as with every turn the darkness to the left comes a little closer. It swallows up everything, and a few steps into the game, soldiers around are dying as they are swallowed up.

Heading out into the unknown, everything must be found. From food to eat, to better weapons lying on the ground, it is a constant battle of whether there is enough time to go out of the way to go get it. Combat occurs in turn-based fashion, and in general it is never a major threat so much as a thing to slow the character down. It especially becomes an issue of whether to stick around fighting, or start running away again. It is actually pretty fun as exploring any dungeon or town becomes a question of if there is enough time.

One Way Heroics is not without its issues, however. The first are the graphics and the UI. It is no joke to say the visuals and the whole game could probably be done on the original NES - they are distractingly bad. Furthermore, there is a lot of info on the screen, and, quite frankly, it is jammed in way too tight, even with options that leave much of it an unintelligible mess.

This is a single "adventure," - a one run. Win or lose, and afterwards it's possible to put a few items into a bank to be used later, or unlock a new class or new stat boost. In general, though, there is no typical 'slowly power up' system, as other rogue-likes tend to have, which is surely a negative thing. Furthermore, there really isn't a story here, or any kind of narrative. Just head out, survive on some small mission, and do it all again.

Mixed with the fact that each character and run is separate, and that there is very little that rolls over to new characters, the replay can be either extreme: high, or nearly non-existent. The later seems to be the better case, as there are only very minor things that differentiate one run from the next. With little reason to "do it all again," a few runs will have most players tired, and with a feeling of having seen the majority of what there is to see.